The Milk Adventure... or... Yeah, We Got Milk

Our Nubian recently birthed three kids, here's my kids with one of the kids (hehe).

They start walking the first day, talking, and after two weeks are healthy and strong. The only unfortunate part is that they were all bucks. No extra milk for us - but so far I don't really know how much milk we'll need anyway. We named them Puzzle, Johnny, and Cabrito.

We had one "runt" who was determined to die the first couple of nights. This involved me waking up at obscene hours in the morning, collecting milk from cranky nanny goat and squirting said nutrients into the mouth. Ugh!

One thing I learned though - have a heating pad when your goat kids. No kidding, it was a lifesaver.



And now, onto the next adventure... milking for us. So I found some plans to build a milking stand - and it was quite a quick and fun little project.

So, yesterday I finished building a milking stand. I liberally applied waterproofing stain - I suspected goat milking is a rather messy business. And so it was.

Today we all piled out into the goat pen, and what do you know? She's a kicker. A "you touch me there and I'll knock the living daylights outta ya" kicker.

Fortunately, the stand is tougher than it looks - and she stayed right in place. My childhood livestock experience came in handy though - I just grabbed her hind legs and held them down, while the family wend to work.

All I can say, is that milking is tedious work. Two hours of work and we getting to the "not too bad" stage.

But, hopefully I am teaching my kids as my parents taught me. The illusion of the supermarket is that everything is cheap and easy. Not so. Learning to milk is probably not a big life skill, but neither is learning the area of a polynomial curve. Both are rarely used, yet it's still good to know.

Plus I now have fresh eggs, milk, and soon cheese. Feta and Cohuila, cottage cheese. Did I mention cheese?

The next big project - is stocking the freezer with Beef. Our 550 lbs of grass fed organic beef lasted well into the second year, but now all I have left is 15 lbs of elk from my brother's last mountain climb.